Despite the discovery of Parkinson's disease (PD) in the early 1800s, a clinical diagnosis is still the prevailing method to assess the disease; there is no blood test or brain scan to diagnose PD. Post-mortem confirmation of the diagnosis is performed by the identification of Lewy bodies and Lewy neurites containing aggregated α-synuclein, the hallmark pathology of PD. Therefore, the existence of in vivo imaging technology for PD would greatly benefit patient diagnosis, disease treatments, and clinical research. In addition, an imaging contrast agent specific to PD pathology could be used to distinguish clinically similar neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's (AD), dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB), Parkinson's with dementia (PDD), and other Parkinsonian diseases.
The development of an in vivo imaging approach for Parkinson's disease patients would revolutionize clinical diagnosis and scientific research. Accordingly, there is need in the art for an agent that is specific for PD pathology to allow disease progression and drug efficacy to be imaged directly and non-invasively in vivo.